Whether or not it’s because she has reached the relatively advanced age of 56 or – as she reckons it – “30 million minutes”, a new spirit of adventure has seized Dawn French. In what she describes as a “sliver of time between the madness of my menopause – now thankfully over – and the impending madness of my dementia”, she’s boldly and at times bawdily going where she has never gone before.

Not only is she making her debut as a solo performer after years of being one half of the most successful female double act in British comedy, she’s also talking to fans about some of the most intimate parts of her life with unprecedented openness.

It was the first night of a national tour and may yet develop over coming weeks, but it was a riveting 120 minutes. In the show, this big-hearted national institution confides tenderly about her adopted daughter Billie and teasingly about her former husband Lenny Henry, claiming that the thought of Big Brother being axed mattered more to her than the end of a marriage that had gone stale. She bravely broaches the agonising health troubles that forced her to shed seven stone ahead of a hysterectomy, and she delights in discussing the new love of her life, her second husband Mark Bignell.

More than that, though, she tackles a subject so raw that when it came to recording the audiobook version of her 2008 memoir Dear Fatty she couldn’t face it and handed the job on to Lisa Tarbuck. Her beloved father, an RAF officer, committed suicide when she was 19. Here, amid a largely entertaining gallop through pivotal phases of her “journey” – a sort of “seven ages of Dawn” dressed up as a “how to” life manual – she finds the guts to voice her devotion and devastation. Admittedly, she has had to pre-record some of this material, but it’s still coming from her. Quite how she can relive it all, maintaining her composure while behind her flash up photographs of a man she regarded as so perfect that almost no one else compares, is beyond me.

Small wonder she received a standing ovation at the end of her first night in Sheffield. But that wasn’t just because this was French with added tears: when it comes to making people laugh, she’s still got what it takes.

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Those acquainted with Dear Fatty will find much that’s familiar here, particularly her hilarious encounter at the age of three with the Queen Mother, the sight of whose teeth sent her into a state of abject terror.

The added dimension, though, is visual. There’s footage of that regal visit, along with snaps from the family album and home-movie clips.

Bringing a touch of theatrical class to an occasion that already feels polished, director Michael Grandage ensures the star, wearing black boots, leggings and a bizarre tasselled top that put me in mind of the tower of Babel, physicalises her anecdotes. She simulates playing dead in a swimming-pool as a kid, and trots us through the self-conscious adolescent horrors of trying to impress “BOYS!”.

Her aptitude for clowning reaches its zenith as she mimes the queasy-making business of giving her mother a DIY gynaecological examination in the bathroom. Too much information? Possibly. Prosaically, I’d have relished a few more showbiz tales from The Vicar of Dibley and elsewhere.

And French may be having her cake and eating it by anatomising her bodily shortcomings on a diagram while railing at commentators like Anne Diamond for judging her weight. Let her, though! As she cavorts in a defiant, saucy-silly fashion to MC Hammer’s tune Can’t Touch This!, you realise that with this enduring, life-affirming phenomenon, you really can’t.